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Shaking Hard Drives Instead of Spinning?
Twyko64 writes "A UK startup called Dataslide aims to develop 'hard drives' made of oscillating sheets of LCD-screen-like material with piezo-electronic actuators and many, many read:write heads. A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen. I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it."
Cue jokes about "shaken, not stirred..."
Man, a 20" hard drive.
That's not progress.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I don't know about you lot, but my LCD monitor is an awful lot larger than my hard drive. Surely all those extra heads are going to be really expensive, too?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Which one? The one on my watch, the one on my cell phone, the one on my calculator, or the one on my laptop?
I hate grammar Nazi's.
I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it.
That really makes me want to go read the article.
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It seems to be wor
I've recently being doing a report for Physics on the Piezoelectric effect, and it is really interesting thing.
When you put a current through a piezoelectric material (e.g. Quartz), it vibrates. The oscillations are used to create sound in Ultrasound Transducers, and they are used in watches as a time measurement.
Conversely, if you mechanically compress a piezoelectric crystal, a charge will occur at the edges. This is used in Ultrasound to detect sound waves, in guitar pickups, and even in those cigarette lighters in cars.
You can read more about it at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectric
Just thought this might interest someone.
- Jax
I could open a cheap hotel/data center with vibrating magic finger beds/harddrives! $$$$
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
spinning is also some kind of movement. seems to work just fine.
www.weberseite.at
This is surely the most useless article I've seen posted here in some time, and that's saying a lot, considering we're just out of election season. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works, the company's website consists of two press releases that don't tell you jack shit, so how about it folks - someone want to fill in a poor /. poster by telling me how this ------- thing works?
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
While I appreciate innovation, I think companies should really try to improve the current state of solid state storage devices. Obviously, no moving parts mean fewer points of failure. Also, other than saying that these devices could theoreticly be better than current spinning disks and flash memory, this article is pretty scant on hard specs about the tech. I guess it's way too early for them to release such information, but I'd like to see some specs on it. Like how they are going to cancel out background noise vibrations. Seems to me like this technology would be very exposed to faults due to things like that, perhaps even small vibrations due to loud noise/etc.
stuff
A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen
Personally, I prefer my harddrives to be less than 12 inches square... (12x12 = 17" diagonal)
I could see this as possibly useful for a slim computer/tablet sort of thing, but I'd imagine that I could get more oomph out of a slim computer with a 0.25" thick CF card.
So instead of getting bad sectors i'll be getting burnt pixels.... Great
The costs of these need to be cut down some more. I could care less about differnet types of "movable" disks.
once we get these, almost-instant boot, awesome read times, then we will get rid of another bottle neck
The signal processing done to the analog signal from one read/write head is tremendous. The performance of modern hard drive comes from the signal detection algorithms and advanced error correction that is performed.
You simply cannot do this at low cost when you have got several thousand or million r/w heads.
--- Eat my sig.
This "new drive" seems to have all the disadvantages of a drum, plus another: it doesn't spin. Instead it just shimmies back and forth.
Well, maybe the new magical material will handle this OK. With the old drums, spinning them up often took several minutes because of the huge inertia (weight was often in the hundreds of pounds for the bigger ones... disaster when the bearings seize and the drum smashes through brick walls!)
Release a rumour, have some 3rd party effect, then fade away.
Just take it from infineon, SCO and now kodak, it works!
Anyone see a patent for this anywhere? Sounds really stupid to me, and I keep thinking of any obscure religion that has April 1st today (because of diff. calendars etc.)
Well I can imagien it will take as long as it has taken platter technology to give us these capacities and speeds right? So maybe in 10-15 years we will use these vibro-storage devices.
I can see a porn tie in somewhere here... just not sure where...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
The idea seems to be that a vibrating sheet could move, while a grid of read/write heads could stay in place, just so something moves to generate a changing magnetic field. While that's certainly true, a spinning disc could also have mutiple heads per arm, multiple arms per disc, and so on. Getting a closely packed array of read/write heads is an equal challenge in either case, and having the surface move continually in the same direction is much easier than having it oscillate.
This would affect what shapes a drive could be manufactured in, but that's unlikely to matter enough to make the idea catch on.
Who is John Cabal?
A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen.
I predict that within 100 years, hard drives will have twice the storage capacity, be ten thousand times larger, and be so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Will my data be all ghosted? Like column 54 on my spreadsheet will show faint trails of what was on column 53?
Who the hell wants a hard drive that big? What's the advantage here, is it more durable, longer lifespan?
It still has mechanical parts to fail, and it sounds like they'd fail faster with all the shaking and tons of read/write heads.
It sounds like something from the Bad Idea Jeans SNL sketch.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The good question is, is vibrating better than spinning? Because we don't have the luxury of nonmoving harddrives at the moment.
I think it could be. You'd need less moving parts, and you'd be able to put them in places that are more easily accessible and replacable.
On the other hand, consider that we do already have such a comparison: power supplies versus harddrives. Other than the fan, power supplies have no moving parts...sort of. But actually the two coils that make up the transformer within a power supply vibrate at 60Hz (in North America), and I've been told that power supply failure normally happens because these wires slowly start to fuse as a result of this stress (culminating in a short)
So which fails more, power supplies or hard drives?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I can just imagine the racket this thing would make. As shake velocity increases to reduce seek time, so will the inertia of the object being moved. Your laptop would take on a life of its own, as it bounces across the desk like a thing posessed.
My rights don't need management.
it has an Antec quiet case and a SATA (that I like to think is quiter than a standard IDE 7200 RPM ChugMaster).
Hmmm let's think about this for a second...
SATA is Serial ATA, a bus format.
Other formats are IDE, E-IDE, etc.
Do SATA drives spin? Sure they do...
Do they spin as fast as non-SATA drives? Sure they do...
What's different on them? The bus...
Does the bus make any noise? No...
So why exactly do you think that SATA matters one way or the other on noise?
Oh and these drives, if they ever become more than a pipe dream, would almost certainly vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
The idea isn't that crazy but don't hold your breath waiting to see it actually work either. This idea is a lot closer to pure research than it is to technical implementation.
If you can change the vibration of individual molecules, you could end up with very high storage densities. I can think of lots of reasons why this wouldn't work but the promise is immense.
While I appreciate the reference to "The Innovator's Dilemma", I think it is a complete red herring. This isn't going to be a 'disruptive technology' for a long time if ever.
This sounds rather like core memory, which was abandoned rather a long while ago, due to storage devices vibrating accros rooms. Obviously, the new devices are a lot smaller, so the vibrations will be equally smaller, but surely still damaging to the hardware.
On a slightly unrelated note, I remember a story I heard of an old stack of 20" platters which used to walk across the room when under heavy load, and unplug themselves!
Yes, flash has been in-use for days now.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
First of all, with so few specifics in the article, one is left with speculating. Speculating tells me that a hard drive with a lot of heads is MUCH more expensive than a regular hard drive. The heads, and the mechanisms for controlling them are probably the most expensive part of a hard drive. So I would think and sheet like drive with a whole lot of heads and a mechanism for controlling the sheet is going to be ridiculously expensive.
Of course, they might have a solution for this, but the post, the article, and the company's web sites leave so much unsaid, we may never know. My guess is we'll never see this. There are many other storage technologies that sound signifcantly more promising than this. And solid state still has a long way to go as well, and as a nother poster pointed out, no moving parts... Sorry if I don't leave a post-it note on my monitor about this one.
Obviously your hearing isn't too good. I can hear all those extra electrons moving through those extra cables if I don't wear my tin foil earplugs.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
From the article: Clayton Christiansen, a Harvard Business School professor, has coined the idea of the innovator's dilemma. If a successful supplier innovates it is generally to add features to and improve a product, but not to destroy it by developing radically better technology.
I've often found it tempting to assume that if capitalism ceased to exist, so would this problem. I'm not asking "would it", but could it?
For this thought experiment, I assume the scenario to be a moneyless society in which sustainable development is of primary importance.
We also might assume that:
1. New technologies aren't made available until they're put through the most rigorous field testing. Even if a project is shelved, the science is in itself regarded as a valued product which may be employed in future technologies.
2. Our hypothetical society utilizes an established set of hardware standards at any given time. The relative universality of the standard is determined pragmatically.
3. Compatibility with existing systems is always addressed as needed.
4. An infrastructure exists to upgrade hardware as unobtrusively as possible when the need arises, rather than as a result of a psychological desire for the illusion of progress.
This experiment is itself a "prototype", but I'm very interested in your insights. When thinking about techno-utopia and contrasting it with the real-life status quo, consider who's interests are being served in each case. I'm trying to envision a realistic scenario in which technological impact is healthy and sustainable.
In this case, the imaginary society roughly sketched above would almost certainly house an intricate bureaucracy, so our perceived technological evolution might actually be even slower in such a case. However, even if each technology's generation lasted longer, that doesn't inherently mean slower scientific progress, but slower techno-social change. Even in our society, of course, development and progress happen behind the scenes even if we don't see a marketed product. It's not entirely proper to evaluate the technology status quo as a whole based solely on what products we have chosen to engineer.
But consider that all products have a social impact, that they're chosen for their desired impact, and that it's safe to assume that the impetus for their production is usually not socially-conscious in the long-term.
Am I the only one who thought of the Dilbert where he (Dilbert) was running Voice Recognition software and Wally was saying how it would be a shame if the software decided to "CLOSE ALL WINDOWS" and "REBOOT," or something of the like.
Now, Dilbert might not even have to be running Voice Recognition software for Wally to perform...
"I remember a story I heard of an old stack of 20" platters which used to walk across the room when under heavy load, and unplug themselves!"
This happened where I used to work in the mid 1980s - a 256MB 12" stack on our VAX 11/750 was being confidence tested by a DEC engineer, but he'd forgotten to wind the feet of the unit down onto the floor - the unit started to shoot forward from between the other rows of system units, like a 100m sprinter making a false start, and the two of us dived across the room and grabbed a side each as the unit reached the end of its power and data cables!
AT&ROFLMAO
The last thing anybody wants here is an earthquake rewriting all of their data.
I can't wait to get one of these shaking, and therefore vibrating, babies in my laptop! Just make sure the shaking is perpendicular to the keyboard ;)
Do you mean the 1" LCD on the front of my phone or a 55" LCD TV?
Look, mom, I can store 5KB or my etch-a-sketch!
:wq
I guess that dibert comic about the PHB shaking his "laptop" because it was hung will come true, though instead of rebooting the laptop it'll just format the harddrive...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Most of us are still using magnetic hard drives, so a laser (and especially multiple lasers) might have some unintended effects.
Can't we just get someone to finish dev on those little plastic cards they used on Star Trek? Those things held shitobits of data...holograms too!
Not necessarily. If you've got "many, many" heads, then you have several options. One would be to have some fixed heads above several tracks, eliminating seek time (great for swap space). Another would be to partition the disk into platter groups, with a separate R/W head serving each group. The separate actuator arms could use the same pivot point and magnet assembly. I don't think you'd need a special controller to prevent head crashes, the head assembly only sweeps ~1/4 of the disk surface anyway, adding another arm at the opposite corner wouldn't interfere. It could probably be done within an existing 5.25" form factor, too.
Just junk food for thought...
Yes... I'm imagining all the bits will wind up dancing around on the surface, like those little football players on those old vibrating football games.
Then again, if that were really an issue, we'd also be dealing with hard drives throwing all their data off the edges of the platters.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
The article is totally content free, and reads like it was written in german, translated to french, and then translated to english. "I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it." Yeah, I can tell you "wrote a" this piece, pal. Next time cut the crap with butterflies and hummingbirds and tell us how the hell a piezo drive actually WORKS.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
More often than not, power supplies fail because of the fact that they are the first line of defense against the electrical supply with all its surges and spikes. Those spikes cause damage to capacitors and voltage regulators that builds up over time until the part fails. The result is that the power supply ends up delivering the wrong voltage (usually higher than desired on one rail, lower or zero on another) and often pulsating DC.
I've only had two computer PSUs fail. One of them went open on the output, but both coils of the transformer seemed to check good. (I didn't pull it out of circuit, so I can't be certain, but the resistance seemed reasonable.) The other one shut itself off repeatedly. After analysis, it was hitting a thermal cut-off because the fan had stopped spinning.
I've had many laptop power supplies fail, but that's always a cable break or short. I have had three such supplies replaced and a fourth that just started sparking....
Never a single case of a coil shorting. A coil shorting would just result in a voltage drop if it happened on the secondary or a voltage boost if it happened on the primary. It would take a very serious short before you noticed it, unlike motors where a short often means that the motor won't have enough strength to start.
More than that, the part of a hard drive that fails is almost never the motor. It's usually something stupid like a bearing leaking oil all over the platter or a head sticking somewhere and then either gouging the platter or snapping off and then gouging the platter.
The real question is whether micromotive hard drives would be more reliable than spinning ones. Depends. How are those devices lubricated (or are they lubricated)? What prevents a head crash? I assume that the heads aren't supported by a cushion of air, which would be an improvement, but beyond that, they still have the same potential mechanical issues, only now there's more than one or two heads to deal with. The more heads, the more interconnects, and thus the more potential points of failure.
This sounds an awful lot like probe-based storage. If it is, the advantages are in terms of increased density, not increased reliability. We won't know about reliability until those things are widely deployed. Until then, it's just conjecture.
Just my $0.02.
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I do not know that we can make that comparison. I only have the most basic understanding of switching power supplies (and not the most impressive understanding of other types of power supplies), but it seems like it would be a much simpler product than a hard drive. My hard drives all have upwards of hundreds of billions of important factors. A switching power supply probably has around 1000. It's much simpler technology. There is less to go wrong.
I think we should start looking to get the luxury of non-moving storage drives. I have helped build a computer that uses a compact flash card as a system drive. This particular one did have a fan, but I plan on helping someone construct a computer with no moving parts whatsoever in the near future. I hope solid state storage technology is persued more zealously and that bigger storage amounts for less money will be a reality is the imaginable future.
And why does your PSU need a fan? I've seen up to 480W passively cooled... (granted, I'm not going to pay for it either, but they are pretty cool.)
For a background on the technology, check out:
http://yogi.pdl.cmu.edu/research/MEMS/
quote: "storage capacity of 1-10 GB of data in under 1 cm^2 area with access times of under a millisecond and streaming bandwidths of over 50 Mbytes per second."
The research is about 5 years old. Because of constant seek times (the surface agitates in both x and y axes) and a kajillion heads, this is technology really designed to bridge EEPROM versus hard drive access times/throughput.
Think 50 Mbytes per second isn't any great shakes? Keep in mind that this is a chip less than a square centimeter in area, and start thinking of replacing RAID drives with these.
sloth jr
Heat generation is one problem.
you have to speed up and slow down the point several for every half cycle.
This is a lot of energy, even assuming it is all on 'springs' you will get some mechanical loss due to friction.
This will likely be much more heat and power consumption then a current rotating drive.
What about the cost of many heads? Right now a hard drive is a small number of expensive heads, and a large area of cheap media. This could cause the cost to skyrocket.